And I appreciate your skepticism. I wouldn't have expressed the opinions I did without some evidence to back them up, though.wizaerd wrote:I appreciate your enthusiasm, but I don't really see anything different here in terms of the developers and how they communicate with their fan base, and how other developers say they'll communicate with their fan base either. Especially for something on Kickstarter. They all seem to make these claims.
The gameplay doesn't really seem all that different either, I can find all sorts of examples, again especially on Kickstarter, where developers say the same thing as it relates to the game they want to make. Emergent gameplay, no set path, everything reacts dynamically.
To the claim that OtherSide have a distinctive design vision, while some team members are new, many of the core group worked on the primary Looking Glass games: Ultima Underworld, System Shock, and Thief (as well as Terra Nova). The central design concept for these games was about enabling emergent play through systems-interactions that support multiple styles of play. I personally played all of those games, along with many other games over the years, and I can confirm that Looking Glass actually backed up their talk of emergent systemic play with the games they made. Perfectly? Of course not. These games were made in the early 1990s; there were limitations. But they made more out of the resources of PCs of the day for player-focused, systems-driven gameplay than any other developer did (with the possible exception of Ion Storm Austin), and more than many have done since then. There are no guarantees for Underworld Ascendant, but given the demonstrated history of OtherSide's leads and the specific comments they've made about their systemic-gameplay design philosophy, I don't currently have any reason to think they're lying about or over-hyping anything.
To the claim that OtherSide are more engaged with their fans than other developers, I can't claim to have visited every forum for every game ever made, so my statement is subjective. What I can state as truth is my personal experience that of all the in-development games I've watched over the years, the participation by the OtherSide team so far on their forums is near the top of the list. As I said, this may decline after/if they hit the magic number on the Kickstarter drive. But for now, they definitely are very chatty. You're welcome to confirm this for yourself by visiting their Underworld Ascendant forum. If after verifying that for yourself you still see no difference between them and any other developer, I'd be interested in hearing that.
If they focused on snazzy graphics now, how would they be any different from all those other developers?wizaerd wrote:I've yet to see anything that really compels me to back this. This is where some really snazzy graphics would come in handy...
At any rate, here's their update in which they directly address this question of placeholder graphics.
and I don't really feel like getting an external one tbh. There is still plenty of time for the KS goal to be reached. If necessary, I'll back higher with no extra reward. And consoles may have taken over but they still can't do everything a PC can just yet. I'll never buy a console as long as I live (or as long as PC games exist) simply for the fact that I grew up on PCs and played a few games for consoles throughout college but I'll always go back to the PC. As my best friend says:
